“Caste is structure. Caste is ranking. Caste is the boundaries that reinforce the fixed assignments based upon what people look like. Caste is a living, breathing entity.”Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
The precise role of the artist – James Baldwin
The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through that vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place. – James Baldwin, The Creative Process
Bell Hooks – Healing
“Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.” bell hooks
Carmen Maria Machado – value of proof
“What is the value of proof? What does it mean for something to be true? If a tree falls in the woods and pins a wood thrush to the earth, and she shrieks and shrieks but no one hears her, did she make a sound? Did she suffer? Who’s to say” Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House
The Body Keeps the Score 1
“Trauma almost invariably involves not being seen, not being mirrored, and not being taken into account.” Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
James Baldwin – Art is a kind of confession
“All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.” Conversations with James Baldwin
In the Dream House – etymology of archive
“The word archive Jacques Derrida tells us, comes from the ancient Greek work “the house of the ruler.” When I first learned about this etymology, I was taken with the use of house (a lover of haunted house stories, I’m a sucker for architecture metaphors), but it is the power, the authority, that is the most telling element. What is …
In the Dream House – Justice 1
“How do we direct our record keeping toward justice?” Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House
In the Dream House – Archive 1
“But the nature of archival silence is that certain people’s narratives and their nuances are swallowed by history; we see only what pokes through because it is sufficiently salacious for the majority to pay attention.” Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House